Computer based measurement opinions?

[KromeDome]

Gang, being kind of an "old school" tech with an "old school" bench, I have been very interested in doing some upgrades on my tools using some modern approaches to testing. I have been very keen on reading all the CLIO threads on the forum, and really want to make the jump to something similar to this. I am having a problem justifying the high outlay since I spend much more time servicing audio amplifiers and performing FM alignments than I do measuring transducers, and I want to use whatever I buy to actually make some money with. I have an excellent Sencore/HP/Tektronics bench, but I wanted a tool that would simplify workflow in some situations, generate documentation for customers and quality control, log data, etc.

I was browsing around the other day and found this soundcard based suite: http://www.virtins.com/ .

I still have my 15 year old CardDplus ISA soundcard from my old recording studio days. It is extremely clean, with the lowest SNR and THD+N specs for a PC card of it's day (I think), and it still runs right up there with the best of them. I have an old ABIT BM6 motherboard with a couple of ISA slots that I could dedicate to this, so I was thinking about giving it a go. I guess my questions are: do you folks use something that is similar, is it useful, and is it worthwhile?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Brian

[yggdrasil]

I have been using Speaker workshop for a while. It is freeware, but rather old. http://www.speakerworkshop.com/

It takes some effort to set up and build the necessary hw to make it work. You will want to read this: http://www.claudionegro.com/

Before you look into speaker workshop you should check your soundcard's performance with e.g. Right mark audio analyzer: http://audio.rightmark.org/index_new.shtml

These freeware tools might be worth while, but you will certainly have to put in some effort to make them work for you. For hobby purposes they are a very good way to go, for professional use I would look for something with like Clio or Woofer tester with the accompanying hardware to make the tests easier and most likely more reliable.

[John W]

Here is another free tool, where you get way more than what you pay for:

http://www.hometheatershack.com/roomeq/

The new version lets you plot and compare mulitple sweeps on the same screen.